The field of the disclosure relates generally to gas turbine engines and, more particularly, to gas turbine engines equipped with an engine cooling system.
Many known gas turbine engines are equipped with a compartment cooling system that extracts cooling air from the compressor section of the engine and directs the cooling air into the turbine section of the engine to reduce high temperatures produced by operation of the engine combustor and turbines downstream of the compressor section. The cooling system typically includes a cooling manifold that is divided into a plurality of pipes. In the event that a pipe fails by cracking or otherwise breaking, and thereby fails to deliver cooling air sufficiently therethrough, cooling air is nevertheless provided by the remaining pipes. The manifold pipes bleed airflow from the compressor to cool the turbine. However, the bleed of excess airflow through each pipe, to accommodate a broken pipe, decreases the aerodynamic fuel efficiency of the gas turbine engine in-flight. Energy produced by the compressor is used for cooling instead of for producing engine thrust.
At least some known piping failure detection systems have attempted to place sensors along the cooling manifold pipes to detect breaks. However, the thermodynamically robust environment of the gas turbine engine has made these conventional sensors fail more often than the pipes in which they are placed to monitor. This disparate failure rate between the sensors and the pipes themselves creates false positive readings of pipe failure, or an inability to detect pipe failure entirely.